UI/UX: Designing for AR & VR

AR takes the feed from front-facing cameras, LIDAR (Light Detecting and Ranging), and other inputs, creates depth-maps, and uses constant field-watching to update the UI and feedback through the device. This environment co-exists with and is interdependent with the real world.

VR takes the device viewport, hijacks it, and superimposes a 2D and 3D mixed environment that the user can interact with. This environment exists outside and independent of the real world.

AR/VR applications will be surface-less, multi-type input, and will allow for real-time shared experiences.

Surface-less interactions:

Understand right now that you’re more than likely used to designing for either a mouse and keyboard or touch-screen respectively, but in AR/VR you will have fully virtual, 3D interactions with no borders or surface.

We can assume that most interactions will be visual, track with eye movement, thumb controls, reach-depth, speech recognition, head-tilt gestures, and a whole lot more.

The reason it’s so important to consider these additional types of input, is that they will fundamentally change the way that users interact with your product, and will come to expect your product to react in turn.

You will need to account for real-time shared experiences between users.

This is NOT a 1:1 design process anymore, it is one-to-many, and then many-to-many.

This will constitute a HUGE shift in the way that applications are designed, because the state of your application for one user will change depending upon the state of your application across other users who are sharing the same experience.

In order to start designing in AR/VR, we have to understand that we are no longer constrained to a particular device “size” but rather designing for the human eye itself.

This FOV (Field of View) exists between the human eye and the viewport surface.

This is key, because while your interactions are not confined strictly to the viewport’s size, your user’s ability to see them absolutely is.

Your user has a total field of view, but your design needs to fit reasonably within their comfortable cone of standard vision.

• Zone 1: Great (central) view: Zone 1 is defined as the central-most view of the user, and is where you should put the most important and/or immediately necessary information.
• Zone 2: Decent view: Zone 2 exists from the edge of the central view to about 10–15° degrees away from the eye’s central line of sight.
• Zone 3: Rough view: Zone 3 exists from the edge of the decent view to about another 10–15° away radially.
• Zone 4: Nope: Finally, we have Zone 4 which is a no-go, or as I like to call it, the Nope Zone.